We analyse productivity growth in UK manufacturing 1980‐92 using the newly available ARD panel of establishments drawn from the Census of Production. We examine the contribution to productivity growth of ‘internal’ restructuring (such as new technology and organisational change among survivors) and ‘external’ restructuring (exit, entry and market share change). We find that (a) ‘external restructuring’ accounts for 50% of establishment labour productivity growth and 80–90% of establishment TFP growth; (b) much of the external restructuring effect comes from multi‐establishment firms closing down poorly‐performing plants and opening high‐performing new ones, and (c) external competition is an important determinant of internal restructuring.

We study entry, exit and survival of UK manufacturing establishments from 1986 to 1991 using the newly released ARD database. We document patterns of entry and exit across industries and over time. We estimate an augmented Cox proportional hazard to examine the survival of new plants in the UK in this period. We ¢nd interactions between survival, size and age of establishment that di¡er between establishments that are singles and part of a group. We speculate that this ¢nding may be consistent with market selection models based on learning.

We use two United Kingdom panel data sets to investigate skill-upgrading in the United Kingdom and how it has been affected by computerisation. Census data reveals that most aggregate skill-upgrading is explained by within-establishment rises in skill composition. Such upgrading is signi®cantly related to computerisation, a relation that is robust to different worker and computer types, endogeneity, human capital upgrading and other technology measures. for the United States and Chennels and van Reenen (1997) for the United Kingdom) face the problem that since the wage is the outcome of demand, supply and/or institutions, many aspects of which are hard to measure, such equations are particularly subject to omitted variable bias. We therefore stick to estimating labour demand only.